The Nenets herders, last nomads of the north

Lena Sarteto’s puffy, rough-skinned hands are a flurry of
activity. As water boils over the fire in the center of her teepee, Sarteto, a
nomad with the Nenets indigenous people of western Siberia, is cooking a feast
for her guests and her family of five. She chops up dark red pieces of jerked
deer meat, peels a huge silver fish and places pieces of dry bread and cookies
on plates that she stores in a wooden sled. Her floor is the grass beneath her
feet; fish bones and scales litter the room around the fire. The fish bones
will stay there when they move on.

Sarteto is in a hurry. In a few hours, her small nomadic group of about 10
families — still called Brigade No. 5, their official name from Soviet times -
will push further n orth. It is early Polar summer, and taking advantage of the
almost continuous light, they herd their 3,000 reindeer to the shores of the
Kara Sea, reaching that part of the Arctic Circle in August. And then they turn
around, fleeing the biting frost and returning their reindeer to grass and moss
of the warmer tundra.

It is an age-old cycle, but one that these families know is increasingly under
threat.

The Yamal Peninsula is also home to Gazprom, the huge Russian energy company
that supplies natural gas to much of Western Europe. And as Gazprom pushes into
the peninsula, it has brought the kind of development — road, rail and pipelines
— that is transforming the tundra. The Nenets have been introduced to asphalt
highways, rusty metal, wire and drilling towers. Russia’s wealth appears to be
cut out of the tundra they once called their own.

“The fish tastes dead; we feel sick after drinking water out of the lakes; our
reindeers get stuck in wire loops or trip over pipes, break their legs and
die,” Sarteto said. She repeats this line as if it is a mantra: “We are the
last generation to lead a nomadic life; our children will live in towns,
without tundra.”

The Yamal Peninsula contains the Bavanenkovo gas field, a vast tract containing
about 4.9 trillion cubic meters of natural gas that Gazprom expects to begin
pumping next year. Drilling towers have begun to dot the horizon. And to help
exploit the gas resource, a new 325-mile long railroad opened last year.

The state is making plans to move 165 reindeer families out of the tundra and into village and towns.

Many of the 13,000 nomads left on Yamal Peninsula fear they will be forced into
permanent settlements — a lifestyle change the government is encouraging, but
which is dreaded by a people who have long forged their identity as travelers
across the tundra’s expanse.

No one knows exactly how many hundreds of years
the Nenets have kept the same yearly rhythm herding the reindeer one step ahead
of the biting frost.

“Our research shows that the biggest fear nomads have is not global climate
change, but the fear of being pushed out of the tundra,” said Vladimir
Tchouprov, a spokesman for Greenpeace Russia.

During a recent camp break, men exercised by lassoing deer while women put up
the teepees, or mya, as the Nenets call their homes. The reindeer provide the
skins for the teepees, fabric for clothes and food.

Energy extraction and development is not the first assault on their way of
life. The Soviet Union attempted to force the Nenets into a form of collective
farming. They split various Nenets tribes into “kolkhoz” brigades, and obliged
them to pay reindeer meat as taxes. Thousands moved into towns in Siberia, and
the indigenous people struggled to maintain their traditions.

Today, Nenet activists see government efforts encouraging them to move into
towns as a renewed assault.

“We are little people,” said Yezingi Hatyako, a 61-year-old elder. “We have no
deputies to speak out for us in parliament, no oligarchs to give us money for
our legal defense.”

As Lena Sarteto’s Brigade No. 5 moved north, they had to cross two paved
highways, a struggle for the reindeer — 300 per family - and young families
with nearly 100 wooden sleds. A team of Gazprom workers had covered the tarmac
with a slippery insulation material, a goodwill gesture to ease the migration
route to pasture. Traditionally, different Nenets groups moved across the Yamal
Peninsula along defined corridors. But Sarteto’s normal route leads into the
heart of the gas field.

A frustrated spokesman for Gazprom said the company is attempting to share the
land with the tribes and act as a benevolent neighbor, but gets little thanks.

“No matter how hard we try to help them - provide them with transportation, pay
them salaries for what they historically did for free, build bridges over the
pipes, or build schools and kindergartens for their children, Nenets still
complain,” said Andrei Teplyakov, a spokesman for Gazprom’s Yamal operation.

Indeed, there is a long list of Gazprom efforts that could be read as
improvements for the nomads in what is called the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous
Area. The company pays salaries directly to the Nenets tribesmen for herding or
to Nenets women for their caregiving. Lena and her husband, for instance,
receive about $2,500 a month, a very decent income in this part of Russia.
Every summer, Gazprom helicopters fly to the nomads’ camps to pick up over
2,000 Nenets children and take them to boarding schools in Yar-sale, the tundra
people’s capital.

But Lena Sarteto, her family around her, said she would live without the cash
in return for an untouched tundra. She turns to the family’s wooden idol,
resting on a piece of fur; she places the statue outside; the divinity it
represents is not supposed to share the house with strangers, a promise
increasingly difficult to fulfill. Sarteto repeats her prayer, as futile as it
seems: “Let Gazprom leave soon, and Yamal become only ours again.”